6 comments Ron Paul has to explain

The storyline dogging Ron Paul as his numbers continue to rise in Iowa — the racist content in newsletters published in the 1990s under his name — poses a significant impediment to his campaign’s momentum.

But that’s not his only problem.

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Even as he disavows the newsletters — the Texas congressman asserts he didn’t write them and never even read them — Paul’s got a collection of other statements that he’ll likely need to explain in greater detail if he expects to capture the Republican Party nomination.

Here are six of them:

The “disaster” of Ronald Reagan’s conservative agenda

“I think we can further thank Ronald Reagan for doing a good job [on furthering the Libertarian Party]. He certainly did a good job in 1980 pointing out the fallacies of the Democratic liberal agenda and he certainly did a good job on following up to show the disaster of the conservative agenda as well.”

Fox News’s Chris Wallace: You talk a lot about the Constitution. You say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are all unconstitutional.

Ron Paul: Technically, they are. … There’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn’t say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause.

Technically, he’s right: None of those programs are explicitly laid out in the Constitution. But even as many in the party are looking to reform entitlements and slash spending, almost no one takes it as far as Paul did in this March 2011 appearance on “Fox News Sunday.” His position is not only ripe for devastating ads, it puts him at odds with a constituency that turns out to vote in high numbers.

American drug laws are designed to fund rogue governments, CIA programs

“I think that might be the No. 1 reason for the drug laws … to raise the funds necessary for government to do illegal things, whether it’s some terrorist government someplace or whether it’s our own CIA to fund programs that they can’t get Congress to fund. I think it’s tragic and the sooner we get rid of the drug laws, the sooner this will end.”

While American attitudes toward drug laws have evolved over the years, Paul’s views on the legalization of drugs are still far out of the mainstream. And they are especially far out of the GOP mainstream.

Paul has gotten much quieter about his views on drug legalization during the 2012 campaign, but there is a video trail that won’t be easy to dismiss. In his 1988 bid, he frequently gave interviews in which he spoke at length about his desire to see drugs legalized. That year, he appeared on “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” a provocative program designed to have people to yell at one another over political issues (Downey previews the segment by saying: “We’ll talk to a man who could be snorting cocaine in the Oval Office.”); the performance makes the Howard Dean scream video clip seem like Masterpiece Theatre.